Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Rylewas a British philosopher. He was a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers who shared Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine." Some of his ideas in the philosophy of mind have been referred to as "behaviourist." Ryle's best known book is The Concept of Mind, in which he writes that the "general trend of this book...
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth19 August 1900
Gilbert Ryle quotes about
deliberate dogma ghost official outline shall speak theory
Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine'.
self hunters hunted
In searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted.
fairy-stories facts categories
A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.
machines dogma ghost
The dogma of the Ghost in the machine.
facts deny myth
To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.
home hands two
When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser may say that he bought a left-hand glove and a right- hand glove, but not that he bought a left-hand glove, a right- hand glove, and a pair of gloves. 'She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair' is a well known joke based on the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types. Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds.
dream thoughtful intelligent
Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings. Boswell described Johnson's mind when he described how he wrote, talked, ate, fidgeted and fumed. His description was, of course, incomplete, since there were notoriously some thoughts which Johnson kept carefully to himself and there must have been many dreams, daydreams and silent babblings which only Johnson could have recorded and only a James Joyce would wish him to have recorded.
plato thinking views
So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word.
myth stills theoretical
Myths often do a lot of theoretical good, while they are still new.